Book Review: Mad World

Image: The cover of the book is a white background with blue, black, and orange arrows pointing to a white silhouette of a profile of someone head in the center. In the upper left corner is mad world in black letters on a white background. In the upper left corner is Mica Frazer-Carroll, the politics of mental health in white letters on a black background.

Mica Frazer-Carroll's Mad World is a decent addition to the field of both radical mental health and academia around mental health and disability justice. The author tells us early on that she has a depersonalization disorder diagnosis, and she sometimes mentions this throughout the rest of the book but does not make the error of constantly using herself as a case study which I appreciate. The author is British so there is a lot of history that I learned about mental health and access in that area that I didn't know about as a US American. Much of it mirrors the history here. There are also bits of disability justice, anti-psychiatry, and radical mental health movement history that I did not know about before- including in the USA- despite having read a lot of different texts on the subject. For example , I didn't know that the anti-psychiatry movement spanned political positions on the left and right, ranging from freedom to be oneself to freedom to not have society pay for the cost of medical care and whatnot. 

This book also captures well how awful psychiatry has been and how much abuse and absolute wrongdoing has occurred within it. It does this without absolutely burying you in the horrific details. I believe she gives you enough information to know what she's talking about without completely overwhelming the reader. I am also a person who has dealt with some of these abuses personally and have seen others deal with them. There's a long history of psychiatry being used against everyone from enslaved people to activists. At the same time my personal experience has not led me to a fully anti-psychiatry position, just as abuses in other medical fields have not led me to be anti-modern medicine- which leads me to my next point.  

This book has some flaws that I see across lots of radical mental health texts, however I do think that the author approaches it with more nuance than many others do. I like that this book asks more questions than it answers. It asks a lot of, "what if we did things x way," sort of questions. However, like many of these sorts of texts, people with very extreme and unglamorous symptoms of mental illness are not really included as much as they should be. We don't fit The narrative of just being sort of different and needing a sort of different society.  

This is very personal for me, so it often colors my ability to read these things in ways that I'm not sure are constructive. I have very extreme OCD that ruins my life. I think about getting actual brain surgery on a daily basis. OCD is not just a different way of viewing the world requiring environmental or systemic change. In fact, relying on that can strengthen OCDs grip. My closest family member suffers from very severe paranoid psychosis and has been on the run for many years- including bouts of homelessness and disappearance- because her brain has led her to believe that almost everyone she sees or interacts with is in on a gang stalking plot. This text talks about hearing voices as some sort of spiritual experience and even discusses entertaining and validating delusions because you can never really know - which I guess may be true with spirituality. The unfortunate fact is that the vast majority of people with psychosis have paranoid psychosis. Are these things caused by stressors and lack of social access to needs? They're absolutely exacerbated by them and isolation definitely can trigger episodes. A social and systemic change model would undoubtedly help these people. I'm not denying that. But, in my experience, when dealing with people with paranoid psychosis or severe OCD or any other number of unglamorous and torturous symptoms, most people disappear. Most people do not want to provide support and create the community-based things that we need- including radical mental health advocates.  

This is what is so devastating about this sort of thing. There is just criticism of the neoliberal mental health awareness movement and how it places the onus on individual change as the solution. Part of this awareness is that they want awareness of people who have something like short-term mild depression and are able to get out of it by joining a gym and taking an antidepressant and then becoming a "productive member of society." Radical mental health is unfortunately not immune to that same sort of influence. When you're really in the trenches dealing with people who are living in absolute hell, it's quite difficult to believe that the biomedical model isn't pretty important, however flawed. Furthermore with things like schizophrenia, there is marked brain damage and measurable effects of the disease that this book claims are not present in psychiatry. This is why all of it is frustrating because radical mental health tends to be about whatever diagnoses or getting the most attention at the time. And the people able to advocate and get that attention are usually the people who are the "highest functioning" and widely appealing, as is true in any movement.  

Another contradiction is that she acknowledges one of the problems with psychiatry and diagnosis is poor inter-rater reliability. This means that from professional to professional they may not come up with the same diagnosis. This is true across all medical fields, but is especially true of psychiatry. I agree. The issue then is that she goes on to support self-diagnosis by people with no training and experience in the field. If the inter-rater reliability between people who are trained is bad, it's going to be even worse between people who aren't. I'm not saying self dx people don't read or research. But, there is a lot of overlap between things and over the decades I have seen various diagnoses be the one that people are seeking out because it is the one that people are talking about the most. Even professionals are not immune from this. This is worse now with the advent of social media. And if one of the main criticisms of psychiatry is that it pathologizes non-normativity, why is there such a strong movement to change diagnosis to include more non-normativity and to allow anyone to diagnose themselves with anything? Nobody wants to get a diagnosis of OCD even though that may be a more correct diagnosis for them than one of autism. People cannot self diagnose with a disorder that includes psychosis because one of the markers of psychosis is not knowing you are experiencing it.  

I may be being unfair here because the author makes it very clear in one chapter that the division between a binary biomedical model and a social model of disability isn't really something that exists. She also acknowledges that we can seek radical mental health while still believing that we want treatment or cures. However much of the book is still devoted to focusing on a more social or systemic change model. She does jump around though. I found myself frustrated with a chapter or two, but then she would move on to the next and I would be back on board.  

The best parts were where she did balance these things and discussed innovative ways of dealing with various symptoms. Some of the discussions with indigenous healers and how they dealt with people hearing voices, having hallucinations, or dealing with delusions were interesting. I would like to see things like this taking up massive amounts of space and radical mental health texts and guides. I also like that she talked about people creating maps of how to help them when they are really going through it. The key is to create these things and one is in a more stable position. In the case of something like severe psychosis though, getting to that stable position is near impossible without the biomedical model. It does happen, but the vast majority of people that I have known and spoken to who have dealt with psychosis have said that involuntary treatment, while absolutely harrowing, was the only thing that brought them back to themselves.  

Near the end of the book she talks about the importance of not leaving anyone behind and not abandoning people with one form of illness in order for another to advance. This is not talked about enough in radical mental health or any other disability justice circles. I've seen Eli Clare and some others discuss, for instance, the abandonment of people with intellectual disability when people with other disabilities focus on telling everyone how intelligent they are. To be a broken record, in radical mental health, people with more extreme symptoms are often abandoned or spoken about incorrectly while other people pathologize difference in behavior and apply diagnosis to it sometimes even after multiple professionals have told them that the diagnosis does not fit. This then changes what that diagnosis means and leads down the path of seeing the people who actually have more extreme access needs being seen as the bad kind of people with that diagnosis (if they are seen at all.) Many people with an autism diagnosis from a young age for instance do not have this diagnosis because they are "privileged." They have the diagnosis because their access needs were so great that they ended up being diagnosed early on in life. This shit is messy and complicated and I'm glad that this author was able to discuss directly the importance of not leaving behind those who may adhere more toward the biomedical model or who may have needs that are isolating.  

Overall, in spite of my ranting criticisms at times, this is a really good book written by someone who clearly cares about the issue and did their best to span the wide variety of viewpoints and experiences that exist across the world of madness and mental illness. This text is a valuable one and both organizes and enriches these discussions.

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

Book Review: Rattling the Cages

 

Image: The cover of the book is a black background with an illustration of a hand reaching up from the bottom of the cover to pull the cord to turn on a light bulb that extends down from the top of the cover in yellow. Across the top of the book and large yellow block letters is rattling the cages. Hello that in smaller white letters is oral histories of North American political prisoners. In the bottom right corner and white and yellow letters is foreword by Angela y Davis, introduction by Sarah falconer, and edited by Josh Davidson with Eric King.

I was really impressed with Rattling the Cages and how well thought out and organized this collection of political prisoner interviews was. It's a hefty volume and includes a lot of people. The book was composed in tandem with some political prisoners which really increases it's ability to cover many of the things that prisoners deal with and endure.

To speak on the organization of it first, I really love that this book was written with everyone in mind. What I mean by this is that there are copious footnotes, a glossary, and many other descriptors describing what various movements, political prisoners, abbreviations, slang terms, and many other things that a person who isn't super familiar with the history and present of various forms of resistance may not know about. Speaking from my own experience, there are many prisoners here that I remember their stories because I was alive during them and watching them happen in real time. I'm 41 years old and so I recall people like Daniel McGowan, Chelsea Manning, etc as well as many of the people that came after them. However I was not alive for people who were arrested in the '70s for instance. It was really helpful to have all of the different movements and their participants briefly but well described for me as I went along. I really wish more texts were written like this. It can be very frustrating to read far left texts, especially about populations of people who lack access to academia like prisoners, be written in a language that very few people can actually understand. It can also become easy to forget what we didn't know before we became active and use a bunch of jargon. The people who wrote and edited this book definitely had these things in mind which I appreciate. I feel like you could hand it to anyone who is able to read English and they would be able to grasp what's going on.

There are a lot of different threads that move throughout these entries. Some participants talked more than others but they were all answering similar questions. There are many things that differ from person to person and from prison to prison (or sometimes jail to jail.) But, there are also many currents that ran through almost every entry. One of the most common was the racial division and prisons and how it could be dealt with based on whether it was a men's or women's prison. There were a couple of people who were in specific situations such as Chelsea Manning being in a military prison where she was one of the only white people or David Campbell in Rikers Island where this isn't as big a thing. But, almost all white people were initially expected to hug up with white supremacists. In women's prisons it was often a place where white prisoners could challenge this very directly and in men's prisons, the retribution was often far more violent and dangerous, so they would have to be more careful and how they approached resistance to white supremacy. Another common theme is how much compromise you have to have with other people in prisons. In some ways I kept thinking how much we could learn about conflict resolution from prisoners because of this. Movements of all types can often end up being a niche echo chamber with lots of people with exactly the same beliefs. At the internet to that and it's even more extreme. How much can we learn from people placed into a hell hole microcosm with a wide range of people all packed together like sardines who managed to find a way to navigate through that and in some cases even organize people and get them to overcome some of their prejudices? That said, everyone was very clear that you should not go in as an activist talking about how you're going to organize everyone and instead, if you have not been in prison before, to be quiet, observe, and treat the prisoners who've been there as the ones who know what's up.

As I mentioned, there were a lot of differences between men's and women's prisons. There are a lot of differences between different men's prisons and different women's prisons as well, but the gender and general seems to have an effect. Women were more likely to be doing care work and taking care of one another than men. This is perhaps unsurprising, but stands out as a more controlled study of human behavior since everyone is in this box they can't escape. There were some male prisoners who took on a more macho role, but many others who carried this sort of care work to other prisoners behind the scenes. Ed Mead impressed the shit out of me. I honestly didn't know much about him before this, but reading about his efforts to combat prison rape, homophobia, etc were pretty amazing. I would never expect you could start a men against patriarchy group in prison, but he did it somehow (and a lot of other really cool things.) There are lots of people that stood out to me and lots of people who did great things organizing people. To list them all would make this review for too long.

One thing I'm really grateful for that this book did for me was get my ass in gear about spending more time with writing my prisoner pen pals. With all of my recent struggles in life I have put it off. I know it's important. However, reading every single prisoner talk about how critical outside support is really reminded me why I started doing it in the first place. People talking about it being the one time they got to escape the place, sitting there reading letters from other people, was motivating. Jake Conroy even gave me some great ideas on conversation starters. This week I sent my prisoner pen pals "desert Island questions" as he described one of his pen pals sending to him. If you aren't already writing to someone, consider making it a regular thing. There are organizations like anarchist black cross, certain days, black and pink, etc who have nifty guides on helping you get started. It truly is life-changing to have that connection. Every single entry mentions this.

Another action point that was mentioned multiple times, and described in depth by Daniel McGowan, was the issue of how prisoner support and politicization has gone downhill over the recent decades. There is some support for more famous political prisoners like Mumia and Peltier, but tons of political prisoners today aren't even known by name let alone supported. Apparently during the civil Rights era, the amount of prisoners that were radical was also much higher. So you have a less politicized prison population and less support for political prisoners right now. This is something that needs to change. It can start by doing little things like donating to their commissary, writing, visiting, etc as individual actions, but there also needs to be coordinated organizing to support political prisoners. We cannot allow the state to just lock people away who are taking the biggest risks in terms of organizing and activism.

I think this is a book that pretty much everybody should read. This is one of those things where human beings are locked behind these giant structures and so easily hidden away. It is easy for those on the outside to forget about them because it's designed that way. It's designed to break people down turn them into numbers, slave labor, etc. I think empathy is a good exercise in general, but very particularly here, thinking about and embodying the words collected in this book really helps drive home how even the little things we could do can really make big impacts. I hope folks will read this book and also take action to connect with political prisoners however they're able.

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

Book Review: Womb City

 

Image: The cover of the book is bright red with the title "womb city" in large black letters, repeating and cascading down the background, fading into the red with each layer. In the center is a dark skinned Black woman facing to the left with a transparent mask covering her face, inside of which is a small fetus. Her braids are sticking out of the back and cascading down to her shoulders. Part of her neck and the upper part of her torso are composed of grey machinery. Across the bottom is the author's name, Tlotlo Tsamaase.

Womb City is not an easy read. Cyberpunk in general is dark and grim by definition, but Tlotlo Tsamaase's Womb City is on another level in part because of who is telling the story. This book is difficult to define because it does not fit only into the cyberpunk genre, but that's the one that stuck out to me the most as I made my way through it. It also has supernatural elements and pieces of other genres (which arguably have been combined with cyberpunk for some time such as in Shadowrun, so maybe I am digressing too much. This is the point where Pat Cadigan would tell me and anyone else fussing over genre borders to just try and enjoy it.) The reason I want to focus on cyberpunk is not only because it is a favorite genre of mine, but because this book breaks the mold of so many (but certainly not all) well known cyberpunk texts by telling the story from the POV of a Motswana Black woman/nonbinary/agender person (the character refers to herself in many ways, hence my possibly contradictory description.) 

One of the biggest issues with mainstream white guy cyberpunk is that female characters, and even moreso female characters of color, are lucky if they get a supporting role. There is often some form of technological sexual exploitation and/or sexual assault which is used solely for world building and to support the story of the main character who is almost always a dude who may save them or seek their counsel in a technobrothel or something. You can see this in the book Neuromancer to the film Blade Runner to the videogame version of Cyberpunk 2077. In Womb City, our protagonist is Nelah, a Motswana woman who is exploited in many of these ways, but whose complex and batshit insane life (lives?) are at the center of the story. As your average ignorant USAmerican, I don't know a ton about Botswana's culture and what parts of it inspired the author to write this book. It definitely made me interested in learning more about her country and her own life.

I have struggled to figure out how to summarize this book without spoiling it. Tsamaase spends a ton of the book world building, creating a complex web of dark and dismal high tech, low life struggle. Women, and people seen as such, are exploited in a variety of sexual and other ways. There is a horrific dystopian authoritarian government. There is body-hopping, but what makes this book super interesting is that, you aren't just transferred to a new body intact after death- you lose many or all of your memories. You become responsible for the host body's crimes as well as partly responsible for your past body- unless you are wealthy and powerful. Most people who have body hopped have microchips installed that record them and some chips can also stop you from committing a crime before you do. These are things you learn early on, but there is so much more. A cascade of horrifying events takes place and we ride the rollercoaster with our protagonist.

I will criticize the repetition a bit. As someone who needs to take notes while reading fiction- especially 400+ page fiction- I appreciate some reminders here and there. But, this book could likely have been 100 pages shorter if we weren't told the same thing over and over unnecessarily. I also think the exposition and vibe were a bit heavy handed and overt at times. Cyberpunk can generally be heavy handed, but sometimes it was so much so that it took me out of it. I also am unsure why gender identity was used the way it was. Perhaps due to the author's identity (all I know is that xi uses xi/xer.) But, the way it is written makes it tough to tell if the protagonist is a woman who hates how women are treated and thus wishes she wasn't one, or if shes nonbinary and/or trans. I think the story would have been much better off without it because it's not developed at all. Though the God presiding over this dystopia is given xi/xer pronouns which did make sense to me.

Be warned, there is not only horror in terms of oppression in Womb City. There is a significant amount of body horror and gnarly violence. There were times that I was taken a back by the level of... creativity that the author used in devising things that happened to the characters. There were times I needed to take breaks from reading this book, which is why it took me so long to get through despite me being fairly absorbed. Sometimes the violence was so over the top I wondered how necessary it was, but it did often fit into the world building. A society like this where people take the measures they do to succeed and survive cannot be fashionable.

There was a section near the end where I laughed and thought, "OK do we really need THIS MANY twists?" I do think the author gets ahead of xirself at times and puts too many ideas together without fully developing them. I gave this 5 stars anyway due to both personal taste and because the level of creativity and cooperation with and diversion from mainstream cyberpunk is something I want to see more of. Surprisingly, with all of the horrific things that happen in this book, it ends on a somewhat upbeat note. I mean, as upbeat a note as a story based in this world can. I didn't finish the book feeling defeated as is sometimes the case with really dark stories. 

If you are a fan of cyberpunk, but see it as a guilty pleasure because of my aforementioned descriptions of how female characters are often treated, this is the book for you. I actually found out about this through goodreads giveaways and I am glad I did. I am not often as pleased with what I win as I was with this book.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Review: Black AF History

 

The cover of the book shows the remnants of a painting of white USA politicians (likely including the "founding fathers') with a large chunk of the center torn out leaving a black background. In the black space, in large gold letters is, "Black AF History: The un-whitewashed story of America" and the author's name "Michael Harriot." Scrawled in red on the remains of the painting has various mens heads circled or scratched out with the words, "mediocre, petty, thief, just rich af, human traffickers, and drug smuggler" labeling different men.

I love it when an author, teacher, or other information sharer captures my attention with a history lesson. Growing up, I hated history class in grade school. We were taught history by white football coaches and, I didn't yet know at the time, that it was mostly lies. This affected me, including the type of books I would seek out or media I would watch. Why would I want more of what the coach was telling me? It was not until college that I got a dose of what history class could be like and what real history was. Since then, I have sought out texts on histories of various things, recent and far past. Michael Harriot's Black AF History is a welcome addition to that list.

One of this books biggest strengths is that it is hilarious without being degrading or dismissive of the horrors of USA history. This is no easy feat. The book centers Black folks and thus, the humor is centers them as well, but I still found myself regularly laughing at the author's delivery (and at myself.) He gives the reader relief at the right times even when we are learning about slavery and genocide. I do want to note that he also makes an effort to cover indigenous struggle, at least in the beginning. The book is very accessibly written as well, not just in the language it uses, but how Harriot uses it. It's fun. He peppers it with little bits of memoir here and there. If this was our textbook in high school, I think many people would have liked history class a bit more. It even has a textbook structure with questions at the end (though they are often borderline or completely rhetorical.)

The book is also very strong in how it tells the human histories (mostly in the USA.) The colonizers, enslavers, white supremacists, and so forth are not the hero main characters, unlike in most USA history books. Rosa Parks is not just a tired woman on a bus and Abraham Lincoln is not the great liberator. Rosa Parks is the highly organized racial justice activist who bravely added her actions to that of many other resistors of oppression and Abraham Lincoln is a boring dude who made it very clear that liberating slaves was the last thing on his agenda. The book cover gives a little taste of this. Both of these facts and the many others in the book are backed up by extensive research and reliable sources. Harriot tells the reader of the nuances in Black thought and belief throughout the centuries up until around the late 1900s (dang, it still feels weird to say that.) He re-frames stories of abuse, struggle, resistance, and victory from the side of the Black folks who went through it. There are many things in this book that I did not know about, even in reading histories that are actually grounded in reality. This book is one of the few that really takes apart the way history is told and completely redesigns it, rather than correcting it in a familiarly boring or whitewashed language.

The section on Black churches was very interesting to me. I admit that I was one of many people who, an atheist from a young age, thought Black Christianity was something that seemed forced upon them by white colonizers and grew with time. I've always known the importance of community that (some) churches provided and thus, like most religion, generally stay out of it. Harriot details the histories of Black churches as more complex sites of enslaved and formerly enslaved people combining belief systems from varied African countries of origin and Christianity to create their own belief systems and practices. This was really eye-opening and fascinating. I did feel myself pushing back a little, though. LGBTQ Black folks I have known have often cited people super involved with Christianity as a negative influence on their lives, just as have white LGBTQ folks despite their churches being different within and between groups. Since I am pretty ignorant of religion aside from what I read and what folks who have been involved tell me, I cannot say much more than that.

My other criticism is the liberalism at the end of the book. I mean liberal as in USA democrats (aka slightly less right wing than republicans) who ignore when their own politicians do the same thing as republicans. It's odd because, throughout the whole book Harriot makes it clear how the problems with oppression are USAmerican problems, not political party problems. He details how the non-Black North and South, "left" and right, etc supported things like slavery in their own ways. But, in the end, he ends up coming for modern day conservatives and Donald Trump while conveniently leaving out when dems did similarly horrific things (such as Obama's war-criminal foreign policy and border/immigration atrocities.) His point is that republicans are worse (true,) but is that really how you are gonna end this book? After all of that time teaching us about the USA, all of those stories of Black revolt and community, democrats are all we get? It almost felt like that section was from a different author or book. 

All of that said, I think this book will benefit a wider variety of readers than even more radical history texts. It has the academic info without the dry or insufferable jargony lingo. It is funny, yet dead serious. And, for the most part, it reveals much of the heart and soul of USAmerica (and the people who really built it.)

This was also posted to my goodreads.